Arctic Summer Ice Will Be Gone In Decades

by Steve

And while Bush dawdles and runs out the clock on his eight years by blaming the Chinese for his doing nothing on global warming, he has bequeathed catastrophe to the next generation.

New measurements indicate that the effects of global warming are much worse than previously suspected and could lead to a complete melting of Arctic summer ice in as little as 13 years, a leading climate scientist says.

The finding follows a U.N. report that accelerated warming would have catastrophic implications for humans and wildlife, leading to food and water shortages across the planet.

The revelation comes from Peter Wadhams, an internationally-respected oceanographer who was gathering data on the arctic ice when his mission aboard a British sub suffered a tragic mishap. Most of the data he and a colleague had collected survived.

Wadhams and a colleague, Nick Hughes, survived the explosion and managed to preserve their data, which suggest that sea ice in the summer could soon disappear altogether, Britain’s ITN Television reported Tuesday.

Scientists had previously predicted that the summer sea ice would disappear from the Arctic by 2040. But Wadhams’ measurements indicate that the thinning was already approaching 50 percent and that the ice could disappear by 2020.

“What’s happening to the Earth as a whole is a catastrophe, and the disappearance of Arctic sea ice has got to be one of the first indicators of the catastrophic changes,” Wadhams told ITN’s Lawrence McGinty. “It’s something we can see. We can see it from space — the Arctic pack ice is there, it’s white, and soon it won’t be there.”

If the findings — which were collected by measuring the ice with three-dimensional sonar equipment and assessing water temperature and salt levels — are confirmed, they would represent a significant acceleration of the damaging effects long predicted from global warming.

“Peter’s result, and, indeed, other results about how much open water there is in the winter in the Arctic these recent winters — how little multi-year ice there is now, ice that survives several seasons — this is all part of a pattern that suggests things are happening more quickly than we had expected,” said Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey.

But to Bush, Cheney, the trolls, and the science-deniers, there’s nothing to see here; move along. As long as they maintain their SUV driving privileges, these killers have no guilt about the devastated planet we are leaving for our children to suffer through. They sleep at night blaming the Chinese for not doing enough; safe in the certainty that their evangelical pastor told them that man was the master over the earth and all species.